The Creed that we pray after the homily says in part “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son …”.

Part of the discussion at our ritual of post Mass breakfast at Denny’s was what does “who proceeds from the Father and the Son” mean? There was no consensus at breakfast other than “John, why don’t you ask Bishop Gracida”.

The question has been around for a long time because it pertains to our understanding a reality for which there is nothing in nature that can be referred to in describing it using human language. The reality is the existence in God of three Persons, called by Jesus Christ: “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit”. Jesus Christ revealed to us their existence, but he did not tell us much about their relationship, especially how the relationship came to be.

That relationship puzzled men for the first four centuries of the Christian Era, I am confident, but it did not become a problem for the Church until the heretic, Arias, began preaching that Jesus Christ was a man but not God. The Arian Controversy was settled by the bishops of the Council of Nicea.

The Fathers of the Council struggled with how to ‘explain in, the Creed they promulgated about the God, after saying “I believe in One God…”, a profession of belief in the existence of two additional persons in God. I am confident that they searched all the words in the Greek language for a word and finally the settled on the wordparadises which is translated in English as procession.

In A Modern Catholic Dictionary Father John Hardon, S.J. (yes Elizabeth there are/were good Jesuits) writes:

PROCESSION, the origin of one from another. A procession is said to be external when the terminus of the procession goes outside the principle or source from which it proceeds. Thus creatures proceed by external procession from the triune God, their Primary Origin. An internal procession is immanent; the one proceeding remains united with the one from whom he or she proceeds. Thus the processions of the Son and the Holy Spirit are an immanent act of the Holy Trinity. An internal, divine procession signifies the origin of a divine person from another divine person (Son from the Father), or from other divine persons (the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son) through the communication of numerically and the same divine essence.

I am not going to go into the Filioque Controversy which produced the Great Schism of the Sixth Century. One can find a lot about it on Google.

Art of Kissing Archbishop Complains that People Think Francis is a Heretic

Art of Kissing Archbishop Complains that People Think Francis is a Heretic

BFP

{Abyssum}

What else would you expect from an “Art of Kissing Bishop” ghost writer of Francis?

During an interview with Sergio Rubin of the Spanish language Religion Digital, published yesterday, Archbishop Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández { Francis’ alleged Ghost Writer for Amoris Laetitia} had this to say in response to a question about The Resistance arising from the Bergoglian new paradigm of allowing the divorced and “remarried” (aka active unrepentant adulterers) to receive Holy Communion:

“…He created an impressive commotion in the most conservative sectors, which treat Francisco as a heretic, affirm that they must dethrone him, or threaten a schism, as if the whole Gospel collapsed because of this matter. The voices of these sectors are amplified a lot because they are using a lot of blogs, publications on the Internet and social networks. But they certainly respond to very minority sectors of the believing population.” HERE

Someone needs some basic lessons in Public Relations / damage control. First rule: Less is more. Even though you are denouncing the position, the fact that you managed to put the words Francisco, heretic, dethrone, and schism all in the same sentence, even when your interviewer didn’t use ANY of those words, really exposes your hypersensitivity and deep concern for the matter. You know there’s a problem, and now we know you know there’s a problem. Secondly, going out of your way to call attention to it necessarily means that your claim that it’s only a small problem of “very minority sectors” has no credibility.

It is truly rich to read about trad blogs accused of being Fake News yet again, the same week that the Vatican has, yet again, proven itself the reigning champion of Fake News. The truth is, resistance to the Bergoglian usurpation is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s snowballing. I mean, even the mainstream conservatives are coming on board. After all, we’ve had almost another six months worth of filth since we discovered this:

WHICH BEST DESCRIBES YOUR OPINION ABOUT THE CURRENT POPE?

Francis is Pope 16%
Benedict is Pope 72%
Some other person is Pope 1%
No one is Pope 9%

IF YOU CHOSE ANY ANSWER IN POLL ABOVE THAT INDICATES FRANCIS IS NOT POPE, WHY DO YOU THINK SO?

Benedict’s abdication was not effective 38%

Francis’ election was invalid 5%

Francis has lost his office due to heresy 4%

Some combination of the above 42%

Neither Francis nor Benedict was ever pope 8%

Out of 674 votes, a staggering 490 said that in their opinion, Benedict XVI is still Pope. That’s 72% of those who voted. But who cares if it were “only” half? It boggles the mind.

Of those, the plurality focused on the ineffectiveness of the putative abdication. Meaning, either he never intended to resign; he wrote his resignation in a legally ineffective way; he made a mistake in fact by not intending to resign the whole office; or that he was coerced such that it was truly involuntary.

Even allowing for the readership’s “style” of Catholicism (for which Francis does not care), even allowing for some multiple votes– the least that can be said is that hundreds of Catholics who found this poll on this blog have the opinion that Benedict XVI is still Pope and that the guy the world and most of the self-identified Catholics of the world hail as pope is in fact NOT THE POPE. HERE

You see, there is big trouble in little china, and everyone knows it. That poll was way back in September, and we’ve come a long way, baby.

By the way, it’s not hard to imagine that poll was copied, enlarged and reprinted, and now hangs as a motivational poster in the deepest war room at the Vatican. The beatings will continue until the numbers improve! Crank up the humble dial! So many wheelchairs to kiss, so little time!

I think it’s time for another poll. But this time it can’t be one of the trad blogs, nor really any blog, and of course it can’t be any revenue-based Catholic site, because none of them would touch it.

Vatican ‘Lettergate’ Scandal Spirals Out with Release of Full Text

The Vatican has released the full text of a letter from emeritus Pope Benedict XVI it had previously altered, but the contents of the letter have turned out to be worse than anyone suspected.

BREITBART NEWS

{Abyssum)

A flurry of news reports accused the Vatican communications department of propagating “fake news” because it had digitally manipulated a photo of the first page of the letter, intentionally blurring the final two lines so they would be illegible.

The Vatican had sought to use a selection of the letter as an endorsement by Benedict of a new 11-volume series of books exploring the theology of Pope Francis, when in fact the letter basically said the opposite.

Read in its entirety, the letter comes across as a polite refusal to write a foreword to the collection, but also includes a sharply critical comment regarding the way the series was put together.

The head of the Vatican’s newly consolidated communications department, Msgr. Dario Viganò, read a selection from Benedict’s letter aloud at the book presentation on Monday emphasizing the “spiritual continuity” between his pontificate and that of Francis. Soon afterward, Viganò’s office released the doctored photograph of the first page of the letter, which also contained a glimpse of Benedict’s signature, while carefully concealing the contents of the second page.

In announcing its decision Saturday to release the full contents of the letter, the unsigned Vatican communiqué adopted a decidedly defensive tone, calling the photo-doctoring an “alleged censorial manipulation” of the image.

The decision to alter the photo was “motivated by discretion and not by any attempt at censorship,” the statement reads, adding that the Vatican had decided to make the letter available in its entirety “to dispel any doubt.”

Unfortunately, the concealed content of the letter that has now been made public suggests that the communications office wished to spin Benedict’s letter in a way that would have been impossible had the whole letter been released.

After saying that he would not write a preface to the collection, since on principle he would never express an opinion on texts that he had never read (and he had no intention of reading them any time soon), the emeritus pope proceeded to criticize the editor’s choice to entrust one of the volumes to a dissenting theologian known for his hostility to the papal magisterium.

Benedict notes his “surprise” at the choice of professor Peter Hünermann as one of the authors, since he “distinguished himself during my pontificate by spearheading anti-papal projects.”

Moreover, Hünermann was a key figure in the publication of the Kölner Erklärung, which, “virulently attacked the magisterial authority” of Pope John Paul II, “especially concerning moral theology,” Benedict wrote.

Additionally, on founding the “Europäische Theologengesellschaft,” Hünermann conceived of the association’s identity “in opposition to the papal magisterium” which was only altered later because of the good sense of other theologians in the group, Benedict said.

Even prior to the Vatican’s release of the full text of the letter, veteran Vatican analyst Sandro Magister wrote that he had learned from an “unimpeachable source” that the second page of Benedict’s letter contained a criticism of the judgment of the editors in having Peter Hünermann write one of the volumes.

The fact that the news had already been leaked leaves room for the possibility that the Vatican only released the full contents of the letter because the damage had already been done, rather than out of an attempt to atone for its lack of integrity in doctoring the letter.

The Lettergate scandal has hit the Vatican particularly hard because it follows on the heels of the publication of a document in which Pope Francis forcefully denounced the spread of “fake news.”

The Vatican’s manipulation of the photograph, which the Associated Press (AP) said “violated photojournalist industry standards,” came just two months after Pope Francis railed against disinformation and “fake news” in his annual Message for the World Day of Communications.

In that Message, Francis said that he wished to contribute to “stemming the spread of fake news and to rediscovering the dignity of journalism and the personal responsibility of journalists to communicate the truth.”

Fake news “refers to the spreading of disinformation on line or in the traditional media,” the pope said. “It has to do with false information based on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader.”

Even a “slight distortion of the truth can have dangerous effects,” Francis said.

Even prior to the release of the Message, Pope Francis had denounced the spread of fake news on several occasions, comparing it to excrement and condemning it as a “very grave sin.”

Settimo Cielodi Sandro Magister

17 mar

More on the Letter of Benedict XVI. There’s Another Paragraph, in Which He Writes…

*

The end has not quite been written on the story of the “personal” and “confidential” letter written February 7 by Benedict XVI to the prefect of the secretariat for communications, Dario Edoardo Viganò, and partially made public by him on March 12.

Not only was there a key passage in it that was purposefully omitted in the press release sent out by Viganò himself:

There’s more. The letter by Benedict XVI that Settimo Cielo published on March 13 in its complete form was in reality not complete.

Between the paragraph omitted in the press release and the valediction there were, in fact, other lines.

And this much could be guessed just by observing the photo of the letter (see above).

In fact, between the first two lines that were made illegible in the photo, at the bottom of the first page of the letter, and the valediction and signature of Benedict XVI on the second half of the second page, there is a space too big to be occupied only by the last part of the paragraph omitted in the press release.

And what else was written there, that Viganò was careful not to read in public and took such pains to cover up in the photo with the eleven booklets on the theology of Pope Francis?

There was the explanation of the reason why Benedict XVI had not read those eleven booklets nor intended to read them in the future, and therefore why he had declined to write “a brief and dense theological page” of presentation and appreciation for the same, as Viganò had requested of him.

The reason adopted by Benedict XVI in the final lines of his letter – we are told by an incontrovertible source – is the presence among the authors of those eleven booklets of two German theologians, and one in particular, Peter Hünermann, who was an implacable critic both of John Paul II and of Joseph Ratzinger himself as theologian and as pope.

The other German theologian is Jürgen Werbick. About Hünermann, a professor at the university of Tubingen, it may be recalled that he is the author of, among other things, a commentary on Vatican Council II that is the polar opposite of the Ratzingerian interpretation. The booklets on the the theology of Pope Francis written by these two are respectively entitled: “God’s weakness for man” and “Men according to Christ today.”

It is therefore clear that, given what Benedict XVI writes in the second half of his letter, the first half also takes on a new significance, entirely different from the one that Viganò wanted to attribute to it in his mangled and biased press release.

And even more could be understood about what Benedict XVI writes there on himself and on Pope Francis if this could be compared with the letter from Viganò to which he replied.

Having Adulterous Catholics Teach Religion Violates Canon Law

Having Adulterous Catholics Teach Religion Violates Canon Law

What else would you expect from Francis-clerics?

March 16, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A new policy of a close adviser of Pope Francis that offers Catholic teaching positions to those who are living in invalid and adulterous second “marriages” is contrary to the Church’s Code of Canon Law, says Edward Peters, an eminent canon lawyer licensed by the highest tribunal of the Church.

“It is nonsense to hold, as it seems an influential diocesan bishop just a few clicks from the shadows of St. Peter’s holds, that divorced-and-remarried Catholics, though ineligible for holy Communion, might nevertheless be ‘outstanding in … the witness of Christian life’ (c. 804) such that they could be ‘ideal for the teaching of the Catholic religion,’” writes Peters in a recent entry on his blog, “In the Light of the Law.”

Peters links to a March 13 LifeSite article about Marcello Semeraro, who is the bishop of the Italian diocese of Albano, and who has indicated his desire to give Catholic teaching positions in some cases to those who are living in invalid second marriages. Semerano, who is a close adviser to Pope Francis, has also said that he wants to make such adulterous couples eligible to be lectors at Mass.

“The inescapable contradiction between the canonical expectations in such cases and the public status of some persons might explain, albeit ironically, why many are so feverishly working to undermine the plain meaning of Canon 915 and now, I guess, Canon 804,” adds Peters.

Canon 915 of the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law prohibits priests from giving Communion to those who live in habitual states of mortal sin, and canon 804 requires that Catholic religion teachers be “outstanding in correct doctrine, the witness of a Christian life, and teaching skill.”

Peters notes that the ecclesiastical discipline of the Church has been built up “canon-by-canon” over many centuries, but “Lately that approach, ‘canon-by-canon’, seems to be a good way to dismantle Church order.”

As Peters has mentioned in previous blog postings, many interpretations of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia, which read it as permitting habitual adulterers to receive Holy Communion, run directly against the Code of Canon Law, particularly canon 915, which has not been altered. Now, other canons are being “assailed,” along with their “ecclesiastical values,” writes Peters.

“Divorced-and-remarried Catholics are not prohibited from joining in many parish activities,” notes Peters, giving examples such as “prayer groups, service organizations, and fellowship activities,” Peters writes. However, “some roles, especially institutional and liturgical leadership roles, are, I suggest, prohibited to certain members of the faithful based on their public actions.”

Peters is a professor of canon law at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary and an advisor to the Vatican’s Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. His posts about issues related to the Catholic Church’s law are widely cited in the media.

This is an instalment in our self-help guide “How to be a good pope”, but is really intended for retired popes rather than ones still poping.It may happen to you that after a few years as the world’s holiest person you will decide to retire, in order to spend more time in prayer, contemplation, beer-drinking, piano-playing, reading the Eccles blog, and other activities suitable to your advanced years.

“That’s three heresies already, and I only opened it for the weather forecast.”

Very good. The chap currently doing all the nitty-gritty pope stuff, such as writing ambiguous exhortations, insulting the ordinary Catholic, and praising Emma Bonino, should be left to tread his infallible path, now that you have decided to be fallible again.

But, horror! One day a pile of junk mail comes through your letter-box. It consists of a set of eleven slim volumes explaining the theology of your successor. What is worse, they want you to write something saying how wonderful it is.

Life is so dreadfully unfair. If the publishers had sent you Fifty more shades of grey, you could have sent it back saying that you only ever wore white; or if it was Building a bridge, you could have passed it on to some engineering friend. But theology is your thing, and you have to respond to the request.

“There are many books that I shall never read, but these are the best.”

Now, if all they want is a snappy headline for their publicity, then, whatever you write, they will be able to extract a phrase and blur the remainder. Your carefully-chosen words “When people describe Pope Bosco [your successor] as a brilliant theologian, my head begins to overheat” will be boiled down to “A BRILLIANT THEOLOGIAN”, with the rest carefully obliterated.

Likewise, “Read these books? I’d rather watch the grass grow” will be edited into “READ THESE BOOKS”. Then again, “I’m 90 years old, and they think I can find nothing better to do” will become “I CAN FIND NOTHING BETTER”.

The moral is clear: write what you like about these books, and leave it to the boys at the Vatican to spin it whichever way they want.

The Anatomy of a Rejection Letter: Some Personal Thoughts on the Benedict Correspondence

Yesterday, I wrote about what happened with the visually altered letter from Pope Benedict — the one the Vatican attempted manipulated to use as a marketing prop to promote an 11-volume series on the “theology” of Pope Francis. If you haven’t seen the facts of the case, read this first.

What I find particularly fascinating in all of this is just how much emotion this situation has stirred up. It’s indicative of both a profound rejection of the actions of the current pontificate, and a profound longing for what was lost from the papacy when Benedict abdicated. But I think we need to look more deeply at what happened, and what it means, because we really need to examine why it is that so many of us feel this way. The letter is really a tempest in a teapot, but it points the way to something much deeper that we need to confront.

First, lets cover the bases on what we think went down.

I’ll state here that from the outset, I believed that the letter most likely was real. Based on anecdotal observation, I think it’s fair to say I was in the minority on this, but even the original excerpts just didn’t strike me as a phony. When the full text was revealed, it seemed more authentic — a balanced letter including both praise and a polite rejection of what was being asked would have made an underwhelming forgery. When it was discovered that they took the trouble to blur and blot out the bits they didn’t like in the promo photo, it erased most of my remaining doubt. Sorry friends, you just don’t go to the trouble of writing a mediocre fake, attributing it to someone of stature who still has access to important people in the outside world, photographing it, manipulating said photograph, and releasing it to the public. That’s a lot of effort to push out a counterfeit.

Those of us who are really suspicious might argue that yes, they would do all of this — as an elaborate ruse! — thereby giving the appearance that they messed up, that the letter is real but they didn’t want the less-than-awesome bits to get out, and then grudgingly conceding to the Associated Press that, “OK, fine, we really did try to cover up the parts we didn’t like”. That way, by faking that they were covering up the mild snub of an elderly former pope who is nearly blind in one eye and didn’t feel up to reading eleven volumes of theology, they lent credibility (because, as I said above, who would write a fake and then pretend to cover it up?) to what amounts to some pretty significant praise in the earlier parts of the letter.

That’s both convoluted and pretty far-fetched. Not impossible, but nothing we’ve seen says that the guys in Vatican Comms are up to that kind of game. They routinely bungle basic communications tasks. We’ve certainly not seen evidence that they are 7D chess players or psy-ops professionals. Also, too much could go wrong with a plan like this. The public, for example, isn’t exactly thrilled with the Vatican for the Photoshopping stunt, and the media is more upset with them than they already were because of the Barros case. This path just has too much liability for too little return.

The one thing I’ll concede that lends the ever-so-slightest bit of currency to the “we faked it and covered it up so you’d believe it’s real, har har har” theory is that they actually admitted their mistake when called out on it. The Vatican has not, of late, been in the habit of admitting much of anything. Still, with Benedict having access to journalists and high-ranking members of the curia who actually like him better than Francis, the potential that he’d simply find a way to deny he wrote this is too strong. It’s possible they admitted it because it was just. so. obvious. So, I’m keeping this theory in the “conceivable but highly improbable” category.

This is where people will start saying that Benedict must have some kind of a gun to his head so he’d never deny it because they’ll pull the trigger, and away into totally unprovable conspiracy land we go. I’ve heard lots of that kind of thing this week from the “Benedict is a prisoner held against his will” crowd. But as Hilary White wrote earlier this week:

I think it’s time to drive this home: Ratzinger isn’t coming to save us. He isn’t the pope. He wasn’t “coerced” into resigning. He hasn’t been intimidated into silence. All these people concocting hysterical fantasies about this have failed to do him the courtesy of taking him at his word. He has repeatedly told us, but we have continued to refuse to accept it.

We have to face some uncomfortable realities, not only about Joseph Ratzinger, but about ourselves. He was never a hero of orthodoxy. We were fooled. We bought the media propaganda. Maybe it’s wounded pride that keeps us trying to defend him. But it’s never a bad thing to apprehend truth, however belatedly or uncomfortable, or painful the implications.

Why did we think that Ratzinger, in this crucial role of CDF prefect, was a bulwark of orthodoxy? Is it simply that we have moved so far away from the ancient Faith that we no longer have a realistic notion of the Faith ourselves to make a comparison, to make an objective judgement?

…

… Perhaps the world of Catholic academic theology had become so corrupted that a man called “progressive” in 1963, but whose ideas remained the same, would look like a “champion of traditional Catholic orthodoxy” by 2005.

There’s nothing whatever to be gained by continuing to invest in this feminine Benedict-nostalgia. In fact, I would say that all this sighing and “Oh, I miss him” is a way of hiding from reality, clinging to a fantasy – not about him, but about ourselves: that we ourselves have become compromised, doctrinally. So much so that we can’t tell what a real “champion of Catholic orthodoxy” looks like.

To many good people — quite likely even some of you reading this now — these are fighting words. Simply because I continue to assert that a) Benedict most likely wrote this letter praising Francis and claiming continuity between their pontificates and b) Benedict bears a responsibility for what is happening now that he has a duty to confront, I have been blocked on Facebook, have lost financial supporters of this website, and have generally met with reactions varying from incredulity to accusations that I am falling prey to obvious lies to anger and accusations of disrespect.

These are not healthy reactions, in my opinion. Frank Walker at Canon 212 said that I had “slammed” Catholics who didn’t think the letter sounded like Benedict. If I did, it was the gentlest slam ever. I merely pointed out that there was a good bit of “there’s no way he wrote that and I refuse to believe it la la la” going on, with people sticking their fingers in their ears. And it is this kind of attachment we have to the idea of Benedict as a guy who would never go along with what’s happening really demands deeper consideration. Again, as Hilary said: “Maybe it’s wounded pride that keeps us trying to defend him. But it’s never a bad thing to apprehend truth, however belatedly or uncomfortable, or painful the implications.”

Something else Hilary has said for as long as I can remember — something I very much agree with — is that the Church couldn’t survive another “conservative” pontificate. The rot beneath the surface was merely papered over by the 21st century analog of authentic, rooted, traditional orthodoxy; by the trappings of office and the liturgical nostalgia of a pope like Benedict who nevertheless counted himself as among the theological revolutionaries who gave birth to the post-conciliar experiment — an experiment that has categorically and manifestly failed. Think of all the times you’ve heard people use the term “hermeneutic of continuity” in an attempt to reconcile irreconcilable things. That’s Ratzinger’s term. He is all about continuity over conflict. It was a central theme of his pontificate, and one many of us have spent time confronting as we evaluated the stark differences between the pre and post-conciliar Church. Which makes the idea that he would claim continuity with Francis pretty darn believable.

So, what do I think really happened with this letter? Well, my impression is something like this:

They sent the review copies of the books to Benedict — this is something that happens all the time with academics, writers, and people of stature. They send you free copies of a book in the hope that you’ll write a blurb, endorsement, or review. So they pass along this box set of Little Mister Theology books to Benedict with a little note request that he write something nice about them.

Being the nice guy that he is, he obliges. He looks them over, skims a few bits, decides that they are generally worthwhile, but not so much that he wants to read 11 volumes. He’s 91. His vision is seriously impaired. Reading that much is certainly going to run afoul of the physical limitations he’s still talking about. Perhaps he just doesn’t feel like it. Perhaps he wants to stay out of this pontificate as much as possible, just like he said. Doesn’t want to unduly influence things.

So he politely says no, but nevertheless praises the initiative and condemns that which it sets out to combat: the idea that Francis is an unqualified simpleton with no theological training, that he himself was an out of touch academic with no practical experience of the Christian life, and that both of their pontificates, however different they may look on the surface, are actually very much in continuity with each other.

Most likely, Benedict doesn’t think his letter will ever even be seen by anyone but the publisher, so he writes it in the manner of personal correspondence, not a formal, public proclamation.

Nothing about this strikes me as out of character for Benedict, or in any way indicative of a conspiracy.

From there, the Vatican publishing house decides to use what they can of his letter for marketing purposes. But I strangely find myself partially agreeing with the uber papal positivist Mike Lewis here. It’s not at all uncommon to take a sentence or two from a good review, slap some elipses and quotation marks on it, and use it to blurb a movie or a book. This is marketing and PR, folks: tell the good part of the story, gloss over the warts. Stupidly, though, the Vatican marketing team took a staged picture that intentionally occluded part of the letter, and they soft-focus blurred the part they couldn’t easily hide under a stack of books so that nobody would see it. Not because there was anything damning in Benedict’s rejection of the request — I strongly disagree that the full text of the letter significantly alters the meaning of the earlier excerpts — only because it distracted from the rather powerful praise he offered earlier in the letter.

It was stupid. It was, as a mode of professional communication to journalists, somewhat dishonest. For a Vatican that routinely lies and employs misdirection, it was another demerit on the credibility scale — especially when their M.O. is to say things like, “Oh, believe us, we’ve released the full text of the Third Secret of Fatima.” It was a needless (if small) deception that took another bite out of an already damaged brand.

But this thing that they’ve done is making people angry in a rather curious way. I don’t think so many people would be this angry if they had deceived us about something else. I think people are so upset because they’re looking for any reason they can to hold on to the idea that this is a forgery. I think they’re angry because they don’t want to believe that our beloved Benedict — the pope who got people receiving Communion on the tongue kneeling again and brought back the Traditional Latin Mass — could possibly think the pontificate of the worst pope in history is just hunky dory.

We have to seriously consider these things, to borrow a phrase from President Kennedy, “Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Because “Truth”, as one of my college theology professors thundered one day, “doesn’t give a flying fig about how you’re feeling that morning.” Because there’s actual evidence out there that they might be true.

The crisis in the Church did not arrive on March 13, 2013. It was not something Francis cut from whole cloth. Its roots go deep, and it was over a century ago that Pope St. Pius X warned us it was coming, and that it would be an inside job. “For as We have said,” he wrote, “they [the Modernists] put their designs for her [the Church’s] ruin into operation not from without but from within; hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain, the more intimate is their knowledge of her.”

I think there are probably many examples of well-meaning and even truly pious men in the recent history of the Church who were nonetheless malformed in ways that led them to be unwitting contributors to the Church’s untoward trajectory. We are all products of the Modernism that infected the Church, one way or the other. We’ve all been influenced by it. It is therefore not our place to impugn motives, but we do need to understand, if possible, where things have gone awry.

We have arrived at a moment in history where wistful nostalgia about happier ecclesiastical times is not a luxury we can afford. We have to remain on alert. We must evaluate critically everything we have taken for granted. If we want to understand the disaster we are witnessing at present, we cannot avoid exploring the rabbit hole to see just how deep it goes, and who helped dig it.

We don’t have to like what we see, but we do have to confront it. Self-delusion is not an option.

Paul VI was always an enigma to all, as Pope John XXIII him- self observed. But today, after his death, I believe that can no longer be said, in light of the fact that in his numerous writings, speeches and actions, the figure of Paul VI is clear of any ambiguity. Even if proving this point is not so easy or simple, since he was a very com- plex character, both when speaking of his “preferences”, by way of suggestions and insinuations, and also for his jumping abruptly from one idea to another, and when he opted for Tradition, but then im- mediately preferred “novelty”; the whole thing in a language that was often very inaccurate. Simply read, for example, his Addresses of the “General Audiences”, to see a Paul VI made up of an irre- ducible duality of thought, a permanent conflict, almost, between his thought and that of the Church, which he was nonetheless to represent.

Since his time at Milan, many already called him “the man of the utopias”, an Archbishop in pursuit of illusions, generous dreams, yes, yet unreal!”… Which brings to mind what Pius X used to say of the “Leaders” of the Sillon: “… (The exaltation of

Sillon was a social Movement, originated in France in 1893 by Marc Sangnier.) At first, the movement adhered to the Pontifical directives. Leo XIII and Pius X honored Sangnier with praises. The organ of the Movement was the newspaper “Le Sillon” (The Furrow). Toward 1903, however, the Movement began to involve itself with political-social concepts that brought it to become a “Center of their sentiments, the undiscriminating good-will of their hearts, their philosophical mysticisms, mixed, with a measure of Illu- minism, have carried them towards another Gospel, which they thought was the true Gospel of our Savior…”

Now, this our first “study” of research upon the historical-reli- gious figure of Paul VI has brought us to a sad conclusion, and that is, that the “religion” preached by Paul VI did not always coincide with that authentic Religion, constantly taught for 2,000 years, by the perennial Magisterium, by all of the Saints and Doctors of the Church. Although it is far from my intention to judge Paul VI, for “only God probes kidneys and hearts”, we nonetheless wish to report, here, the painful findings of our study on him, convinced as we are that he has drawn the faithful toward a “new religion”, while this continues to carry the label of “Catholic”.

For the drafting of this “Dossier” – given the seriousness of the “stakes”, especially when it comes to honestly taking one’s courage in both hands to tell the whole “truth”, despite the risk of becoming unpopular (exactly because, customarily, “veritas odium parit” – “Truth begets hatred”), the author of this work, for more than a decade, has been going through no less than 30,000 pages of encyclicals, speeches, Conciliar documents, historical journals, commentaries and magazines of all kinds, in order to gather an overview adequate enough to weigh up the Pontificate of a Pope who has already been consigned to History. Therefore, making it open for discussion and possible “judgments” as to his actions.

It is evident that, with this work of mine, I do not claim to have done an exhaustive analysis of the entire oeuvre of Paul VI. Yet his quotations that I am presenting here cannot certainly have a different meaning from what they contain; and therefore, the presentation of other diverse texts of his, cannot but validate the “mens” of this “Hamlet”, that is, of the “double face” of Paul VI!

However, the honest reader will find that our writings reproduce his true dominating “mentality”; one so deeply rooted in him as to have disastrously inspired his entire pastoral and his Magisterium, his true dominating “mentality”; one so deeply rooted in him as to have disastrously inspired his entire pastoral and his Magisterium.

“Moral Unit” independent of the doctrine of the Church. Hence the condemnation inflicted upon it by Pius X in 1910.
(S. Pius X, “Letter on the Sillon”, 25 August 25, 1910, n. 41. 3 Psalm 7, 10.)

We are presenting this work, therefore, not to rejoice in it, but with sadness. It is but the execution of a painful duty. As Faith is by now publicly attacked, we can no longer feel bound to the duty of silence, but rather to that of unmasking an anti-Christian mentality, so many years in the making, and one that sunk its root in the Pontificate of Paul VI, too.

Certainly, writing about him has not been easy on me, as Paul VI was a Pope at the center of an Ecclesiastical shipwreck that perhaps was, and still is, the most dreadful the Church has ever witnessed throughout Her history.

In writing about him, therefore, one cannot be beating about bush, quibble in search of sensational episodes in order to hide the reality, that is, the real responsibilities of his unsettling Pontificate, in the complex framework of Vatican II.

That is why, to come to a humanly equitable judgment of the thought of Paul VI and his responsibilities, I had to go over again the “official texts” of his writings and his words, pronounced during Vatican II and those of his executions. Only thus could I untangle the grave “question” of his responsibilities in the dreadful drama the Church has lived and has been living from the onset of the Council to this day.

I may, therefore, make mine the lesson of Manzoni in his celebrated book: “Observations Upon Catholic Morality”, where in Chapter VII, he wrote:

«… One must demand, of a doctrine, the legitimate consequences drawn from it, not those which passions might deduce from it».

And so, let us open directly the pages of the First Address to the Council, in which Paul VI made his own, manifestly, the principle of “Modernist heresy” that Pope John XXIII has already expressed, in his Opening Address of the Council, on October 11, 1962, (an Address, however, which had been inspired by the then Archbishop of Milan, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini), in which he, Paul VI, said the following:

«…But, above all, this Christian doctrine be studied and exposed through the forms of literary investigation and formulation of contemporary thought».

Now, such “principle” is unheard of in the history of all the centuries of the Ecclesiastical Magisterium, as it takes the place of the “dogmatic” principle, alone to offer proof and certainty of the “Catholic truth”, and the teaching Church has always taught that the “reason of believing” does not lean at all upon scientific conquests, achieved through man’s intellect, for the “reason of believing” rests exclusively upon the AUTHORITY of REVEALING GOD and upon that of the SUPREME MAGISTERIUM OF THE CHURCH, which received from Jesus Christ the mandate to teach it officially and in an infallible manner.

The “principle” enunciated by Paul VI, on the contrary, becomes the negation of that of the APOSTOLIC TRADITION, wanted by God, and it reverses the traditional Magisterium of the Church, putting on the teacher’s desk, in place of “REVEALING GOD” and of the “TEACHING CHURCH”, the method of man’s autonomous investigation and the formulation of a purely human and arbitrary doctrine, peculiar to the philosophical-literary style of modern man – therefore, of the man of all ages, mutable with the times – oblivious that only the “truth” revealed by God is the sole immutable and eternal truth.

Therefore, it vanished; that principle of the investigation to know “Revelation” by knowing the original teaching of the Church was done away with, instead it would be that of knowing the teaching of modern thought.

But this smacks of “heresy”!
One cannot invent dogma, nor can one reduce it into a convenient cliché, as it has been done in these years of upheaval and arrogance, ignoring that Christ, and only Him, is and shall always be the absolute “truth”.

How Paul VI should have shuddered, for inflicting on the Church of Christ this horrible catastrophe, by means of and in the name of an alleged Ecumenical Council!

Furtheremore how prevailing is still that whole 2nd Chapter of Epistle 2.a of St. Paul to the Thessalonians:

«… For the mystery of iniquity already worketh: only that he who now holdeth do hold, until he be taken out of the way. And then that wicked one shall be revealed: whom the Lord Jesus shall kill with the spirit of his mouth and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: him whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power and signs and lying wonders: And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish: because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying: That all may be judged who have not believed the truth but have consented to iniquity»

This is the reason, the only reason, in the light of the Gospel and of the Tradition of the Church that we are asking the reader to proceeed with the following pages.

II Thessalonians II, 7-12.

«… I was not drawn to the clerical state which seemed sometimes stagnant, closed… involving the renunciation of worldly tendencies in proportion to the renunciation of the world… If I should feel this way, it means that I am called to another state, where I would be fulfilled more harmoniously for the common good of the Church».

(Paul VI to Jean Guitton, in: “Dialogues with Paul VI,” p. 285) ***

«I noticed how his thinking was secular. With him, I was not in the presence of a “cleric”, he even promoted an unexpectedly secular Papacy»! (Jean Guitton, in: “The Secret Paul VI”, Ed. Pauline)

3/15/2018. Walnut Creek, Ca. Every year California’s legislators submit upwards of 4,000 bills (40 each) on a broad variety of subjects for approval. Maybe a quarter to a third of these bills get chaptered.

Bills are supposed to either amend, delete or replace state codes.

This means that every year there is a considerable amount of change taking place in the state codes and therefore, in public policy.

Failure to maintain an informed public of the actions to be taken by these bills especially in a state with a super majority of Democrat party members, can result in a loss of Constitutional Rights, moral and ethical traditions and personal freedoms.

I have been analyzing bills for several years, especially in the area of education and health care. Many of the problems seen in today’s educational programs, for instance, started long ago through the slow and deliberate transformation of education from academics to today’s preparation of students for an idealized future workforce. See: Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Investment Act 2014.

The evolving nature of public education can be traced to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s six-trillion dollar failed experiment called, “War on Poverty’. This created the 1970’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act – ESEA. This Act has gone through many re-authorizations (changes/amendments) until now it is the Obama Administration’s Every Student Success Act-ESSA. We have gone from the parents exercising their God-given/natural right to know what their children are being taught and what they are being kept from knowing.

Through legislation on both the federal and the state level, schools have become social engineering laboratories for the collection of student and family data.

Where once a student’s “Right to Know” meant the imparting of a traditional liberal arts education [in the classical sense of the term], i.e., the U.S. Constitution, math, reading comprehension, writing and science. etc. the classroom has now become a place where students are indoctrinated into the world of government managed “citizenship” [more technically, the so-called Right to Access Senator Connie Leyva [D, CA] SB320, which features a “morally tainted sex-education as well as ensuring “safe” [except of course for the unborn] on-campus access to early medication abortion services. Specifically it is through Democrat legislation that high school freshman biology classes have morphed from learning the basics of human reproductive biology to inculcating children into the netherworld of “eliminating” pregnancies.

Similarly purposed legislation has blurred the line between a parent’s [dwindling] right to have discretionary power over how and what their children are being taught and the new regimen, where children essentially become wards of the state from the moment they leave home until they return.

Some legislators, such as former Democrat Senator John Vasconcellos [D] have taken this idea to its most absurd extreme: required mental health counseling on the grounds that children had been “damaged by the influence of their family, faith and community. And his legislative record reflects that anti-parent bias.

Today, March 14, 2018, we see a new phenomenon in education; the training of students as Alinskyite community agitators.

According to news reports, we learn that upwards of 3,000 schools, including religious and charter schools across the country have dismissed students for the day in order to attend and even lead protests in front of city halls targeting our Second Amendment Rights.

Who gave the schools the authority to do this you might ask? We did by omission, having stood back while our children were used for crass anti-American activism.

By our silence, we have sent the message to our children that we, their parents, have abdicated responsibility in their upbringing, instead delegating it to representatives of the ever expanding state bureaucracy

CFRW has appointed several members to be the official analysts of legislation. We spend many hours researching bills, reading articles and talking with legislators. We do this to provide our readers with the tools to effectively exercise your rights – and responsibilities – in this democratic republic, this “shining city on a hill.”

Be informed, be active and remember, freedom is not free.

Some facts, some ironies regarding state law covering high school and college, including Charter Schools, students who engage in public protests during school hour:

In 1998, then Republican Assembly member Bill Leonard authored a bill which, since passage, has been referred to as The Leonard Law. This bill (unable to locate original bill) mandated that students had the same First Amendment, Freedom of Speech rights as adults (or human being) while on campus as that student would have while off campus. (Education Code 48950 & 94367)

In the 2007 legislative term the bill was amended by Assembly members Leland Yee (D-SF) and Joe Nation, (D-Marin) to include Post Secondary colleges and Universities.

Irony: The bill giving students as young as high school Freshmen, the right to walk off campus to protest the Second Amendment, was amended by Leland Yee,(D-SF) who, while Senator was removed from the legislature in disgrace because of his involvement in and remuneration from, gun-trafficking.

A spokesman for the California Dept of Education’s Government Affairs Dept stated that this act of walking-out to protest, if interfered with by school personnel, could result in a lawsuit against the school for violation of a student’s right to freedom of speech.

A student’s walking-out is considered to be voluntary on the part of the student. This same spokesman said, when questioned, well it would be hard to know if someone was forced to walk out.

This spokesman was also asked what would happen, who would be held accountable if a student was injured during this time off campus. He responded that, well, teachers are supposed to go along with them.

Irony #2.
Teachers would be required to also leave campus to attend to the protesters, leaving the on-campus remaining students to their own devices. These same teachers continue to receive their full paycheck while off-campus and not teaching.

Schools do not have to inform parents about this activity, but students can be told that if the student fails to return to school after the protest he/she will be marked with an unexcused absence which they will have to explain to their parents. Teachers are not required to provide make-up lessons for missed classes. This could, possibly have an effect on applications to enter higher education programs.

Five years after Benedict XVI fled the Chair of Peter, allowing “The Dictator Pope” to occupy it—thus accomplishing the temporarily thwarted objective of the St. Gallen “mafia”— Benedict now declares in a purported letter from him that “there is an internal continuity” between his pontificate and the Bergoglian dictatorship. Addressed to Msgr. Dario Vigano, Prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, the letter has all the earmarks of a public relations ploy to restore confidence in a papacy even commentators of the neo-Catholic mainstream are finally compelled to recognize as “disastrous.”

Tellingly, the purported letter is addressed to the head of the Vatican’s PR department in response to a letter from Vigano, who must have solicited Benedict’s reply. The letter praises a series of eleven booklets by various authors on “The Theology of Pope Francis”—not to be confused with the theology of the Magisterium. In the portion of the letter made public by the Vatican Press Officewe read the following:

I applaud this initiative that seeks to oppose and react to the foolish prejudice according to which Pope Francis would only be a practical man devoid of particular theological or philosophical formation, while I would have been only a theoretician of theology that understood little of the concrete life of a Christian today.

The little volumes rightly show that Pope Francis is a man of profound philosophical and theological formation and they help therefore to see the internal continuity between the two pontificates, even with all the differences of style and temperament.

Consider, first of all, the absurdity—one of the innumerable absurdities of the post-conciliar epoch—of a “retired” Pope commenting on the “style and temperament” of his successor, as if to assure the shareholders of a publicly held corporation that the new CEO, despite his disturbing behavior, will maintain company policy and the value of the company’s shares. Is this for real?

That aside, how did the ailing 90-year-old “Pope Emeritus” find the time and energy to read eleven volumes, even “little” ones, on “the theology of Pope Francis”? In fact, Benedict hasn’t read them. In the leaked integral text of the letter, which Sandro Magister’s blog has done us the favor of publishing in the original Italian, we find the following admission, concealed by the Vatican:

However, I don’t feel I can write a brief and dense theological passage on them because throughout my life it has always been clear that I should write and express myself only on books I had really read. Unfortunately, if only for physical reasons, I am unable to read the eleven volumes in the near future, especially as other commitments await me that I have already assumed.

Quite amusing is Benedict’s observation that he will not be able to read the eleven volumes in “the near future,” not only because he is physically weak, but because of “other commitments” that have priority. Evidently, the schedule of the “Pope Emeritus,” who pronounced himself too feeble to be an actual Pope, remains so busy he cannot devote his attention to the theological views of the very man who succeeded him on the Chair of Peter—the same successor for whom he has nothing but praise. He did, however, find time and energy to attend his own birthday party, at which he quaffed eine kräftige Tasse Bier in the midst of an apocalyptic Vatican-orchestrated assault on faith and morals of which he seemed blissfully unaware that Roman afternoon in the Vatican gardens:

Antonio Socci asks: “Why has the Vatican not made public the whole letter?” Answering his own question, he writes (with appropriate derision):

Now it is all clear. The great Sandro Magister… has published in its entirety the letter from Pope Benedict that the Vatican on Monday had not distributed to the press, and thus we discover that in the second part—with subtle sarcasm—Benedict makes known how to interpret the “toll” he had to pay in the first part

In substance, the Pope Emeritus explains that he had no time to write a comment on the “formidable” theological thought of Bergoglio (as he had been asked), and not even the time to read “the eleven little volumes,” by various authors, which unfold all the Bergoglian wisdom. They would have been useful to illustrate the thought of the Argentinian pope, but he, Benedict, lets it be known that he has not read them and does not even have the intention of reading them because he has other things to do. Get the hint? A few words to the wise (it seems to me an elegant and sublime mockery) [emphasis by Socci; translation mine]

Worse, as the AP’s Nicole Winfield reports, the Vatican has been caught digitally altering the last two lines on the letter’s first page, which begin the paragraph in which Benedict reveals he never read the volumes his purported letter endorses:

The Vatican admitted to The Associated Press on Wednesday that it blurred the two final lines of the first page where Benedict begins to explain that he didn’t actually read the books in question. He wrote that he cannot contribute a theological assessment of Francis as requested by Vigano because he has other projects to do.

A Vatican spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, didn’t explain why the Holy See blurred the lines other than to say it never intended for the full letter to be released. In fact, the entire second page of the letter is covered in the photo by a stack of books, with just Benedict’s tiny signature showing, to prove its authenticity.

Winfield points out that “Most independent news media, including The Associated Press, follow strict standards that forbid digital manipulation of photos. ‘No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph,’ read the AP norms, which are considered to be the industry standard among news agencies.” With exquisite irony, she concludes: “Vigano heads the Vatican’s new Secretariat for Communications, which has brought all Vatican media under one umbrella in a bid to reduce costs and improve efficiency, part of Francis’ reform efforts. The office’s recent message for the church’s World Day of Social Communications denounced ‘fake news’ as evil and urged media to seek the truth.”

Vigano “never intended for the full letter to be released” because­­—is anyone really surprised? —both the letter and the eleven hastily produced volumes it falsely appears to endorse are part of an elaborate fake news operation designed to promote the fictional narrative that Bergoglio’s theology is wholly orthodox. We are expected to believe this despite an endless torrent of disordered, offensive, insulting, scandalous, heretical or proximately heretical utterances and outrageously twisted interpretations of Scripture, compiled here by a group of diocesan priests who, in order to avoid the long arm of Bergoglian mercy, must remain anonymous.

Benedict’s obvious slighting of “the theology of Pope Francis” does indeed lend itself to reading the letter as a whole thus: “I am saying what I am expected to say, but I want you to know that I cannot vouch for it.” And yet Benedict was still willing to subscribe to the claim that eleven volumes he hadn’t read “rightly show that Pope Francis is a man of profound philosophical and theological formation,” thus providing the Vatican PR machine with a handy blurb for a work of which he knows practically nothing. This bespeaks either undue influence upon him or his own lack of candor. Which, I cannot say for certain.

Socci notes, by way of comparison, the laudatory preface Benedict provided to Cardinal Robert Sarah’s “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise”—a book that Benedict has read. In that preface, entirely “composed in his diminutive handwriting during Easter Week,” we read the following:

As I was reading the new book by Robert Cardinal Sarah, all these thoughts went through my soul again. Sarah teaches us silence—being silent with Jesus, true inner stillness, and in just this way he helps us to grasp the word of the Lord anew….

From this vantage point, he [Sarah] can then see the dangers that continually threaten the spiritual life, of priests and bishops also, and thus endanger the Church herself, too, in which it is not uncommon for the Word to be replaced by a verbosity that dilutes the greatness of the Word…. Cardinal Sarah is a spiritual teacher, who speaks out of the depths of silence with the Lord, out of his interior union with him, and thus really has something to say to each one of us…. With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands.

Benedict provided this preface even though he cannot have failed to notice that Cardinal Sarah’s book launches a veiled but devastating broadside against the entire Bergoglian regime, with Amoris Laetita in the bull’s eye, as indicated by the following quotations (collated by the indispensable Life Site News):

I will untiringly denounce those who are unfaithful to the promise of their ordination. In order to make themselves known or to impose their personal views, both on the theological and the pastoral level, they speak again and again. These clerics repeat the same banal things. I could not affirm that God dwells within them.

But they talk, and the media love to listen to them in order to [reveal] their ineptitudes, particularly if they declared themselves in favour of the new post humanist ideologies, in the realm of sexuality, the family, and marriage.

These clerics consider God’s thinking about conjugal life to be an “evangelical ideal.” Marriage is no longer a requirement willed by God, modeled and manifested in the nuptial bond between Christ and the Church. Some theologians in their presumptuousness and arrogance go so far as to assert personal opinions that are difficult to reconcile with revelation, tradition, the centuries-old Magisterium of the Church, and the teaching of Christ.

Bishops that scatter the sheep that Jesus has entrusted to them will be judged mercilessly and severely by God.

And yet, for two millennia, what a surprising paradox it has been to see so many garrulous theologians, so many noisy popes, so many successors of the Apostles are pretentious and infatuated with their own arguments.

During conclaves, the spirit points out God’s choice to the Cardinals; the latter must submit to his will and not to human political strategies. If we thwart the Holy Spirit by miserable, petty human calculations, secret meetings, and media consultations, we run headlong into tragedy and we are gravediggers of the divine nature of the church.

Some pretentious, cynical ideologues threaten the truth of Jesus. Confusion, relativism, and chaos point toward to be fatal prospect.

The impression is given that sin no longer exists; adultery, divorce, cohabitation are no longer to be considered serious sins. They are failures or stages along the way to a distant ideal.

The Church today is going through unprecedented exterior and into interior trials. Something like an earthquake is seeking to demolish her doctrinal foundations and her centuries-old moral teachings.

It is necessary to revive staunch adherence to the Catholic faith, it is necessary to proclaim the consistency of the Church at the heart of a world that is in complete upheaval and threatened with collapse.

Benedict’s preface declares: “We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing such a spiritual teacher as head of the congregation that is responsible for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church…. With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands.” But, as Magister mordantly observes: “It is no mystery, however, that Jorge Mario Bergoglio confined Cardinal Sarah to that post in order to neutralize him, certainly not to promote him. In fact he has deprived him of all effective authority, has surrounded him with men who are workingagainst him, and has evendisavowedin public his proposals for a ‘reform of the reform’ in the liturgical field.”

Then there is Benedict’s statement for the funeral of Cardinal Meisner, one of the four “dubia cardinals” Bergoglio has refused to answer, wherein Benedict praises the late cardinal for his “deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even when the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.”

The fact remains, however, that Benedict has lent his name and signature to the fraudulent claim that Bergoglio exhibits a profound philosophical and theological formation, even though he has spent the past five years engaged in shallow mockery of “the theologians,” whom he would consign to a desert island, while shamefully misrepresenting the teaching of Saint Thomas as supportive of his campaign to admit public adulterers to Holy Communion. What Bergoglio exhibits, rather, is crude demagoguery in aid of what even Philip Lawler is constrained to call “a deliberate effort to change what the Church teaches.” That effort that includes a non-stop jeremiad against the defenders of Catholic orthodoxy by a Pope that Lawler’s own bestseller describes as a “Lost Shepherd” who is “misleading his flock.”

Despite its contrary signaling, therefore, Benedict’s letter to Vigano must be seen as cooperation in a scheme to rescue Bergoglio’s imploding papacy from itself, no matter what Benedict’s subjective intention may have been in going along with the ruse. The letter’s claim of an “internal continuity” between his pontificate and Bergoglio’s is a transparent evasion of the truth. “Internal continuity” is just another way of saying “apparent lack of continuity.” Nor can the apparent lack of continuity be reduced to “differences of style and temperament.” There is not an even arguable continuity between the two Popes regarding the dominant theme of Bergoglio’s pontificate: an absolutely unparalleled attack on the Sixth Commandment and even the natural law, far more dramatic than Bergoglio merely trudging along the path of “ecumenism,” “dialogue” and “liturgical renewal” established at Vatican II. Bergoglio has jumped the divider into an express lane to final disaster, leaving even the conciliar Popes in the rear-view mirror.

Surely, Benedict would know that Cardinal Sarah’s book, while it avoids naming Bergoglio, reflects the reality that his pontificate is one long campaign to overturn the teaching of Benedict himself, John Paul II and all of Tradition on the absolute impermissibility of intrinsically evil behaviors, including adultery and contraception, and thus the “intrinsically impossible” admission of public adulterers to Holy Communion on account of their “permanent and public adultery”—a norm to which “the conscience of the individual is bound without exception” because it is “a norm of divine law” the Church “has no discretionary authority” to alter.

Benedict would have to know in particular that Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia reduces the Sixth Commandment, an exceptionless precept of the divine and natural law, to a mere “rule” and an “ideal” that does not bind strictly in certain “complex circumstances,” thereby smuggling into the life of the Church, under the guise of “authentic Magisterium,” precisely the evil of situation ethics that John Paul II condemned as follows in Veritatis splendor:

The negative precepts of the natural law are universally valid. They oblige each and every individual, always andin every circumstance. It is a matter of prohibitions which forbid a given action semper et pro semper,without exception, because the choice of this kind of behaviour is in no case compatible with the goodness of the will of the acting person, with his vocation to life with God and to communion with his neighbour. It is prohibited — to everyone and in every case — to violate these precepts….

The Church has always taught that one may never choose kinds of behaviour prohibited by the moral commandments expressed in negative form in the Old and New Testaments. As we have seen, Jesus himself reaffirms that these prohibitions allow no exceptions: “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments… You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness” (Mt 19:17-18).

Francis, in short, is the one and only Pope in 2,000 years who has dared to attempt a flat contradiction of all prior teaching of the Magisterium on a matter of basic morality that binds all men without exception, and then label this outrage “authentic Magisterium.” The only way Benedict would not be aware of this catastrophe is if he has lost the capacity for reason since his abdication, or else has been kept from seeing or even hearing about the pertinent Bergoglian texts and oral utterances.

The latter scenario is certainly at least somewhat plausible, given that Benedict resides in a monastery building, has not left the Vatican enclave since his abdication and a brief sojourn at Castel Gandolfo, and is not even allowed to appear at public events unless invited to do so by Bergoglio. The Atlantic Monthlyaptly describes this living arrangement as “the Pope in the attic” who is “an autoclaustrato, a self-cloistered contemplative in an order with a membership of one,” and is confined to a “cell of his own making, committed not to travel and pledged not to speak out against his successor.” I doubt Benedict is surfing the Web to sample the rising worldwide opposition to his successor’s dictatorial insanity. As for print publications, we can be certain he is not provided with anything even remotely critical of Bergoglio.

On the other hand, if Benedict is aware of the Bergoglian Debacle, then the conclusion that he is knowingly aiding and abetting it is inescapable. In that case, the letter to Vigano would be just another example of how the conciliar Popes have presided over an epoch of deception that the Vatican has been orchestrating for more than fifty years. The half-century of lies emanating from a manifestly less-than-holy Holy See began with the Big Lie that Paul VI had juridically banned celebration of the Church’s immemorial received and approved rite of Mass, despite the lack of any definitive papal pronouncement so stating.

That fraud upon the Church was finally exposed by Benedict himself in Summorum Pontificum. Yet even Summorum kept the fraud going on some level by means of the shifty rhetoric that has enabled the post-conciliar revolution from its inception. Quoth Benedict:

The last version of the Missale Romanum prior to the Council, which was published with the authority of Pope John XXIII in 1962 and used during the Council, will now be able to be used as a Forma extraordinaria of the liturgical celebration. It is not appropriate to speak of these two versions of the Roman Missal as if they were “two Rites”. Rather, it is a matter of a twofold use of one and the same rite….

Already from these concrete presuppositions, it is clearly seen that the new Missal will certainly remain the ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, not only on account of the juridical norms, but also because of the actual situation of the communities of the faithful.

So, according to Summorum, the Mass of the ages is now “extraordinary” while the New Mass, the most extraordinary—and destructive—novelty the Church has ever seen, is the “ordinary” form of Catholic worship. The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Oceania has nothing on the post-conciliar Vatican apparatus and the Popes who have headed it, Benedict included. Nor can we overlook that the very author of Summorum conspicuously refused ever to celebrate in public the traditional Mass the post-conciliar revolution had overthrown.

Here, and in so many other places throughout Joseph Ratzinger’s long ecclesiastical career, we see an evidently conflicted theological liberal, a “moderate” Modernist who was instrumental in the Council’s disastrous departure from its traditional schema. Yet he later had the intellectual honesty to admit the failure of the post-conciliar aggiornamento, especially where the new liturgy is concerned, while invoking the utopian hope in a future realization of “the true Council” by way of a “hermeneutic of continuity” that he was never able to explain and should never have been necessary in the first place. And, quite unlike his successor, as Pope he had enough respect for the Petrine office to declare at the outset of his pontificate that “The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law…. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.” In fairness to him, we can say that he kept his word in that regard, at least materially.

But who can provide a definitive diagnosis of the mind of Ratzinger, his subjective intentions for the Church over some sixty years, or the reasons for his mysterious abdication? Certainly not this writer. This much is clear, however: Pope Benedict’s abdication and the rise of Bergoglianism mark the end of the line for neo-Catholicism and its ruinous attempt, assisted too often by Ratzinger himself, to reconcile Tradition with the spirit of the age. As I observed on these pages back in 2002:

The neo-Catholic phenomenon in the Church, therefore, parallels the political mobilism of secular society, in which the term “conservative” no longer means what it did forty years ago. A Democrat of the 1950s would view today’s “conservative” Republican as a liberal savage. In like manner, today’s “neo-conservative Catholics”… are progressives who embrace novelties that Saint Pius X could not have imagined in his worst nightmare. Not only do they embrace these novelties, they attack the “paleoconservative” traditionalists as “schismatics” for declining to follow suit.

Sixteen years ago, in commenting in particular on the inadequacy of Cardinal Ratzinger’s ambiguity-laden Dominus Iesus as a “conservative” antidote to the rise of the fatal heresy of indifferentism in the Church, my co-author and I wrote:

Dominus Iesus has not proven to be the answer to the postconciliar crisis. No Vatican document will be. It is our conviction that the only way out of the crisis is the full restoration of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical tradition, classical theology, classical preaching and Scholastic philosophy. That is, a restoration of the Church to her basic condition a mere forty years ago. We are also convinced that such a restoration is no nostalgic dream, but an inevitable provision of God’s providence, for the current abysmal state of the Church’s liturgy, preaching and general discipline cannot possibly serve as the foundation for her mission in the future. Sooner or later, God will intervene, if those who govern the Church will not do what has to be done to bring her back to health.

The unprecedented and untenable division of the Church into traditionalist, “conservative” and liberal branches, with Bergoglio now clumsily attempting to saw off the first two branches, signals an historical turning point at which it seems only divine intervention of the most dramatic sort will be able to restore the Church to the path of Tradition from which her human element so tragically deviated at the Council.

That day of divine reckoning seems almost to be upon us. But whenever it comes, and in whatever circumstances it takes place, our abiding faith in the Church’s indefectibility allows us confidently to predict an ultimately decisive defeat of what Pope Pius X, the sainted foe of Modernism in all its guises, denounced as the “unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO.”